When Ashbey Beasley, a gun-safety activist from Highland Park, heard that federal agents were patrolling in nearby Highwood Thursday morning, she got into her car and went out to look for them.
It didn’t take long before she saw a group of agents out in front of a resident’s home.
“I noticed then that there were several cars and that there were several agents. And so I just pulled up and I just started filming,” Beasley said. “And then at one point, I just decided it should be a live recording.”
Beasley, who witnessed the Highland Park July 4th parade shooting, said the agents told her that they were doing a wellness check.
There had been reports on social media that federal immigration agents were knocking on doors for wellness checks and using the tactic to find people to deport.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman confirmed officers were conducting investigations into whether unaccompanied children released to sponsors from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement are victims of human trafficking or exploitation.
“ICE is fully engaged and committed to child safety and accountability,” the agency said in the statement.
The Trump administration has ramped up enforcement efforts as part of its promise to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history.
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In a separate incident on Thursday, a man was arrested in Highwood and sent to an immigration detention center in Indiana.
The North Shore community of Highwood is just north of Highland Park and about 40% of its population identifies as Latinos. Community members reported seeing ICE agents in an area near Oak Terrace Elementary School where many Latinos live, often sharing one home between multiple families.
The footage taken by Beasley shows at least seven agents outside the Highwood building. It’s hard to hear in the video, which she posted on Instagram, but Beasley said the agents asked the woman to let them come inside.
Beasley said the woman refused so the agents questioned her outside her door, asking her about her immigration status, where she worked, if she had ever been sexually harmed, if she felt safe where she lived and if she was free to leave her house.
Immigration attorneys are hearing of similar “wellness” checks happening across the country, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor.
“They’re using these so-called wellness checks as a subterfuge to find out if the sponsor is in the United States illegally or could be theoretically accused of harboring the individual and that’s gotten a lot of immigration lawyers very riled up,” Yale-Loehr said.
Even during the wellness checks, Yale-Loehr said people still have the right to remain silent and not open the door to authorities unless presented with a court warrant.
While Beasley was videotapping the interaction, agents told her she was impeding. But she maintains that she wasn’t because she was talking to people watching the live video.
“I was very careful to, like, stay in my car, to stay out of their way, to not get between them,” she said.
Everyone has constitutional rights to video-record the encounter as long as they aren’t impeding or interfering with ICE agents, Yale-Loehr said, who added that he believed Beasley was within her constitutional rights based on a video posted on Instagram.
“They can videotape things whether it’s on the sidewalk or in their car,” Yale-Loehr said. “That’s a basic constitutional right that everyone has.”
